Citizen Surveillance Helps Officials Put Pieces Together

Onlookers snap photos and shoot video after two bombs exploded atthe Boston Marathon. Such evidence has been used in the investigation.
Getty Images

By

Geoffrey A. Fowler and

Joel Schectman

April 17, 2013 7:42 p.m. ET

BOSTON—Living with Big Brother may have at least one benefit.

The spread of technology from security cameras to smartphones in every pocket, has proved helpful to criminal investigations—including the one focused on this week's Boston Marathon explosions, Joel Schectman reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

As surveillance technology has spread from security cameras to smartphones in every pocket, it has sparked privacy concerns. At the same time, the technology has proved helpful to criminal investigations—including the one focused on this week's Boston Marathon explosions.

On Wednesday, a government official said the Federal Bureau of Investigation used surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor department store and restaurants near the bomb site, as well as photographs from average citizens, news organizations and others to help identify a suspicious person at the marathon.

That followed officials earlier in the week asking the public to share digital video and photos, which the FBI processed along with surveillance-camera footage from businesses near the finish line. Investigators planned to go through "every frame of every video," Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said.

The use of such technology in the Boston investigations highlights how, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the adoption of surveillance technology and the amount of data gathered has grown considerably. Still, video and photo facial-recognition technologies remain in their infancy.

From 2011 to 2016, the global market for video-surveillance technology is expected to nearly double to $20.5 billion, according to IHS IMS Research. According to Forrester Research, 68% of public-sector and 59% of private-sector companies have adopted video-surveillance technologies—and 9% plan to adopt it in the next two years. Moreover, more than a billion people now carry a basic tool of surveillance in their pockets: camera-equipped smartphones that connect to the Internet.

Combining forensic image data from professional and personal sources has worked in previous cases. After the 2011 riots in Vancouver, British Columbia, authorities used nearly 1 million digital images and 1,600 hours of video gathered from the public and closed-circuit cameras to identify criminal acts and eventually bring charges against more than 200 people.

Challenges remain to making use of all the new data. Facial recognition is often difficult to use in large-scale investigations because surveillance footage rarely has full-frontal images, which are needed for computers to identify enough key points on a face.

Terror in the U.S.

Site of the Blasts

"It's not the way it is in the movies," said Aki Peritz, a former counterterrorism analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, now senior policy adviser for national security at Third Way, a Washington think tank. "In real life you don't have someone looking directly into the camera, and the ability to make a match can be very much degraded if you don't have a full frontal."

Then there is the challenge of collecting and sorting through the data. Boston has one of 77 nationwide intelligence "fusion centers" that is involved in helping investigators in this week's bombings to pool data and conduct analysis, said Mike Sena, director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The state-run centers were funded by the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11 attacks to address the lack of interagency information sharing.

The centers allow authorities to tap thousands of law-enforcement data sources, along with public data such as information from credit agencies, said Mr. Sena. But the system is still hampered by having data stored in separate systems that can't easily communicate. For example, classified reports from different federal agencies can't be accessed on the same machines, he said.

Last year, the Senate subcommittee on investigations released a report questioning the effectiveness of the centers in fighting terrorism and protecting privacy.

Explosions Rock Boston

Citizens also play a role in investigations, with the growing culture of crowdsourcing. Users of online discussion board 4chan sifted through photos and spotted a man seen at the marathon finish line wearing black pants, a black shirt and a white hat. That man appeared to bring a backpack to the race, but it seemed to be gone later.

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston formed a 10-person social-media research team to run a similar project, scheduled to launch Thursday, which would allow people to upload photos from the attack and tag clues. They said they plan to continue their project even if a suspect is found.

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